Update for those who only read the question: a lot of this question is based on my misunderstanding of reputation loss and of the Roomba. I'm striking out all of the misinformation, so that someone else who reads this won't come out of it with the same misunderstandings I started with. gnat explains in the comments that most of my worries were unfounded.

Over 4 years ago, I asked this question. It has evidently stirred up some interest recently, because on June 30th, its accepted answer with 20 upvotes was converted into a comment, and yesterday it was dupe-hammered.

I do not dispute the fact that it's a duplicate. When the question was fresh, a comment in the accepted answer pointed me to that duplicate, and I said "That's exactly what I needed to ask!"

I do, however, question if the conversion of the answer to a comment was done a bit overzealously. I suppose it was perceived of as a link-only answer, but the question itself was asking for a link to documentation. As such, the few lines of explanation within the answer were all that I needed. I asked a follow-up question within that answer, and the small up-and-back between the respondant and me gave me all the information I needed. From my perspective, this was a perfect answer to my question.

There are quite a few consequences to changing this answer to a comment. Those 20 upvotes were the second-highest scoring answer of the respondent, who now has 5584 points. Taking 200 points away a priori seems a bit extreme. Incidentally, this is also my top-voted question, so I have to admit a vested interest in wanting it cared for.

Also, none of the remaining answers are as good, and I won't select any of them as an accepted answer. So now this question is a dupe with no accepted answers, and the two remaining answers currently have votes of 0 and -1.

As far as my limited knowledge of the Roomba works, this question will now eventually get deleted. That strikes me as a bad idea, because it has over 15,000 views (while the question it's a duplicate of doesn't even have 8000). Yes, it's clearly a duplicate, but it evidently is a lot easier to find than the dupe, and still had all the valid information (until that information was moved into a sequence of comments, which as we all know are ephemeral).

Should the answer I accepted as the valid answer be reinstated? In my opinion, the answer was valid, and shouldn't have been turned into a comment. If I'm correct about the question being a candidate for the Roomba, shouldn't its number of views tell us this question should be saved? Keeping the accepted answer would solve all that.

(For those below 10k, the content of the accepted answer and its associated comments are now the first 6 comments under the question.)

Sorry for that, @Scott, my bad. I did spend a lot of time on that answer thinking what to do as it was a link only answer. The question did ask for a link and I wanted to vote to close that as a tool-req, but fortunately it was already closed. I didn't want to decline the flag as it'd send out a wrong message that the post was flagged wrongly as a link only answer. After a lot of thought I chose the middle path and moved it to a comment.
– Bhargav Rao♦Jul 5 '17 at 15:34

I'm now thinking of undeleting the answer, deleting the other completely link-only answers and merging the post with the destination, would that be a better choice? (I need your opinion on that)
– Bhargav Rao♦Jul 5 '17 at 15:36

4

you seem to misunderstood a couple of things about how system works here. First, author of deleted answer did not lose any rep because at the moment of deletion it had score over +3 and was visible for over 60 days. Second, the question in question is ineligible for any form of Roomba by multiple criterias: it has score over +1, its close reason is duplicate, it has answers
– gnatJul 5 '17 at 15:37

@BhargavRao Thanks for your reply to my query. It wouldn't have been a tool-req by any means, since it's asking where to find the documentation of what I thought was the JavaScript language. I think it best to not merge it because something about this question is much more findable than the dupe.
– Scott MermelsteinJul 5 '17 at 15:38

It's asking for a link to an external resource. That falls under tool-req IMO. Either that or is a yes/no question. "Yes/No, there is/isn't a specification for the JS image object".
– yiviJul 5 '17 at 15:39

@gnat Yes, it seems I do have quite a few misunderstandings. If the author didn't lose rep, I feel better about that. And I was very unclear on the way the roomba worked, so thanks for clarifying.
– Scott MermelsteinJul 5 '17 at 15:39

3

@ScottMermelstein it would certainly fit the the bill for Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it. however that said a dupe is often a better outcome.
– BugsJul 5 '17 at 15:40

@Bugs And yet, the question was both about "software tools commonly used by programmers" and "a practical, answerable problem that is unique to software development". It's not asking for a tool, it's asking for hard-to-find documentation of one of the most popular programming languages in use. It was not a question leading to opinionated answers; rather there was only one good answer, which got converted to a comment, which makes the answer less viable.
– Scott MermelsteinJul 5 '17 at 15:52

Interestingly, the common theme in the question @gnat linked to was "if something old is upvoted, we generally shouldn't delete it." While I'm glad there was no reputation loss to the answer poster, I still think their answer should have remained. Between my question and that answer, the page got about twice as many views as the dupe answer. Why change any part of the good thing?
– Scott MermelsteinJul 5 '17 at 15:54

Without getting shirty the way I see it is; let me do some research into that and provide a link to the documentation. I've now recommended off-site resources. You can appreciate that you've two bad answers because of the very nature of the question.
– BugsJul 5 '17 at 15:56

6

keeping old highly visible and scored posts that blatantly violate current quality standards creates wide open broken windows "why can't I do link only answer when this one exists". Guess that's the main reason why folks bother deleting these or applying historical-lock
– gnatJul 5 '17 at 16:20